"the tree is old but it's...Still full of sap..." Ps. 92:14 (NAB)

August 10, 2004

The Observer has ceased publication. During the time my friend Bob Hodous and I wrote for them, the Obsever moved from a serious (40K/year) loss to a small profit. If anyone out there is looking for a columnist, please check my columns and let me know. Pray for Ron Hasson, Kimberly Robbins, Alison Bartlett, Marilyn Ellinger, and Patrick Hite, who worked hard to provide Charlottesville with this newspaper.

July 27, 2004

In the film Spider-Man II Peter Parker plays all three roles in the Good Samaritan story (Luke 10:25-37). The film character of Peter Parker/Spider-man (Tobey Mcguire) can be seen as Samaritan, the Passerby, and as the victim on the side of the road. The apparent villain, Dr. Octavius (Alfred Molina) starts out as an idealistic scientist who falls prey to the temptation to power (Luke 4:6). He is, however, only a tool manipulated by the real villain, Harry (James Franco). The one real hero in the film is Peter Parker’s girlfriend Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) who rescues him and makes him whole – at least until Spider-Man III.

Before reflecting on the message, I should note that the film is just plain comic book level fun. It has spectacular action and Kirsten Dunst is beautiful.

July 05, 2004

The film "Miracle" (Disney, 2004) is a story of two victories. The first, widely reported, is the story of how the 1980 Olympic hockey team won a gold medal with a stunning victory over the Soviet Union. The second, almost unnoticed, is the story of how coach Herb Brooks and his wife, Patti, coped with his obsession for a gold medal. The film depicts a troubled, growing, and changing relationship. The couple struggles to find a balance between work and family.

June 17, 2004

Ronald Reagan’s help in ending the cold war came from Gorbachev, the Pope, Jimmy Carter, a Polish Colonel and a Soviet KGB Colonel. The roles of the Pope and Gorbachev are widely appreciated. Few, however, recognize that Reagan’s success was also due to the fact that he implemented and added credibility to nuclear missile programs begun under Jimmy Carter. Reagan’s rhetoric and credibility led Soviet intelligence to a threat assessment that the US could be preparing to start a nuclear war.

This assessment caused the Soviets to misinterpret US actions, leading to the “war scare” of 1983. Reagan and Gorbachev, once they were both aware of this danger, began to negotiate reductions in nuclear arms. Here is the story, in brief form.

May 19, 2004

If institutions were persons, we would recognize that they are all too human in their ability to discount warnings of impending disaster. Consider:

• Both the Pentagon and Congress had fragmentary reports of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.
• FBI agents, including John O’Neil, had obtained information and were assembling a story that would have predicted attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
• The American Catholic church failed to respond to warnings issued in 1985 that priestly pedophilia would create grave problems.

Institutionalized denial is an ancient problem. In biblical times the prophets repeatedly warned the nation of Israel to return to its ways, lest it suffer a military defeat. In Greek mythology, Cassandra suffered the fate of warning of impeding disasters – only to find that no one believed her.

This pattern is found in universities as well. Echoing the Vietnam era, University of Colorado officials found that the athletic department maintained “plausible deniability” about the use of sex, alcohol and drugs to recruit football players.

Corporations frequently discount warnings. Dartmouth business professor Sidney Finkelstein wrote about it in Why Smart Executives Fail and What You can Learn from their Mistakes. He suggests that this blindness to failure and deafness to warnings results from “an insulated culture that systematically excludes any information that could contradict its reigning picture of reality”. If these corporations were persons, we would say they were in denial.

The analogy isn’t far-fetched. In 1911 the Supreme Court found that a corporation is a legal person. Management literature often discusses terms such as corporate culture, command climate, and corporate personality. Visiting high school students quickly recognize that Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia have vastly different characters.

Confronting denial is difficult enough when an individual person is involved. Confronting an institution is more perilous. Maybe we should paraphrase Mt. 13:57 to read “A prophet is without honor in his own” company, agency or church.

If institutions were persons in recovery, they would acknowledge that they were in denial and that they were created by a higher power. They would rededicate themselves to accomplishing the purpose for which they were created.

Most often denial patterns are broken only after a severe and public failure. This can happen. NASA openly acknowledged that it's dysfunctional culture contributed as much as any technical error to the loss of the Columbia Shuttle and its astronauts. US Army Major General Taguba openly admitted to congress that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were a result of leadership failure.

In today’s secularized media and academic world, many will object. While they might accept the concept of institutionalized denial, they will find the analogy to recovery unacceptable. Since it implicitly mentions the “G-word”, it is politically incorrect and would be declared an unconstitutional violation the separation of church and state.

It was not so at the beginning of our republic. In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson recognized: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”.

James Madison provided a structure that made it possible for citizens to insure that governments fulfill their proper functions. The tools: a divided government, freedom of press and religion are still available to us. Citizens must continue to be vigilant. Benjamin Franklin said it best: when asked "what kind of government we have" he replied “A republic, if you can keep it”.

May 07, 2004

Speaking at the University of Virgnia’s Miller Center on May 4, David Kay detailed lessons learned and unlearned from the search for Weapons of Mass destruction in Iraq. Dr. Kay was special advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence and UN’s Chief Nuclear Weapons Inspector.
In 1991, after the first Gulf War, the inspection team went to Iraq and found some surprises. US intelligence knew that Iraq had used mustard gas against the Kurds and Iranians but did not know that it had produced VX, a nerve agent. It knew Iraq had a nuclear weapons program but did not know that the program was close to developing an actual weapon. The biological weapons program was both larger and more through than suspected.

The team was in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. During these seven years Iraq put up numerous obstacles and engaged in extensive deception.

The fact that Iraq had weapons development programs – a point on which every European intelligence service agreed – led to the assumption that it also had weapons and was preparing to use them.

With this as background, Kay summarized what intelligence found after the war:
• Iraq had continued its programs by importing banned goods, many of them from Europe.
• Research and development programs chemical and biological weapons continued.
• Active efforts to develop delivery systems continued. With foreign assistance, Iraq attempted to extend the range of its missiles beyond the allowed 75 miles.
• Research and development programs did not lead to production of WMD in large numbers after 1998.
• Because of the chaotic way in which the war ended, there are a number of irresolvable ambiguities: there will always be the possibility that a few weapons were hidden by Iraqi forces.

Kay then asked, why did we get it wrong and what does that tell us about the future? There were three reasons for our failure.

First, there was Iraq’s continuing deceptive behavior. After the war, this deception was uncovered when Iraqi officials said that they did not disclose to UN inspectors for fear of Saddam. He destroyed the weapons on the theory that they were too easy for UN inspectors to discover.

Saddam did not simply throw doors open to Hans Blix and the UN inspection team, because he wanted his own people to continue fear him. Belief in the existence of WMD served as a deterrent to the Kurds and Shiites, as well as Iraqi neighbors. Saddam also feared his own military. He wanted them to believe that Iraq still had WMD. Some of them might have mounted a coup if they had sensed that he capitulated to the west. This was confirmed in post-war interrogations when senior officers all reported that other units still had WMD, even though their own unit did not.

The second reason for intelligence failure stems from Pearl Harbor. Since 1945, US intelligence has been dedicated to the task of preventing surprise attacks. During the cold war, when the West faced a massive threat, intelligence became very skilled at using technological means to count numbers of weapons and assess Soviet military capabilities. Analysts were less skilled at understanding the Soviet viewpoint and assessing intentions. This led to intelligence failures, including the Cuba missile crises, and failure to predict the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and invasion of Afghanistan. Technology also enabled the intelligence community to lessen its dependence on human sources. Spies, as Kay said, are not “eagle scouts” and are likely to engage in behavior that is repugnant.

Until 1998, this lack of human sources was not a major problem because UN inspectors were in Iraq. After 1998 defectors were the sole source of information. Kay said that the information from the defectors was so good that US intelligence should have been suspicious. These governments denied us direct access to the defectors and provided incomplete information. When Colin Powell testified about the mobile biological agent vans, he was relying on information from a single source. These vans brought fear to intelligence analysts because they meant that every truck in Iraq could be a source of biological agents. This would have made it impossible to be certain that there were no agent production facilities remaining.

The Iraqi émigré community, and the defectors, understood that they and the US shared a common, vital interest: eliminating Saddam and installing a new regime. They also understood that the US would be more likely to go to war if it was convinced that Iraq had an arsenal of WMD.

Third, intelligence failed because “we connected the dots” without continuing to “collect more dots”. This was important because Iraqi behavior – active attempts to deceive and conceal WMD information continued. This led to failure to recognize that motives for the behavior had changed. Saddam continued to deceive even after he had most of the weapons destroyed. He did this not to hide the weapons, but to maintain deterrence by concealing a weakness.

During the cold war, our ability to understand the Soviet viewpoint and intentions continuously improved. After Sputnik, the government funded extensive education programs in science and technology. Universities developed major programs in Soviet and eastern European studies. Major newspapers had correspondents in Moscow. As a result, the country had a broad and deep knowledge base concerning Soviet behavior and intentions.

In contrast, the knowledge base of Arabic languages, Islam and the Middle East is shallow. Given the lack of human intelligence sources and an understanding the Arabic viewpoint, surprise is almost inevitable.

Kay was asked about corruption in the oil for food program and diversion of funds from food to Saddam’s palaces. He said that he had a team of forensic accountants from the IRS working for him. When they explained the pattern of Iraqi deception to him it was the only time in his life that he ever felt like “hugging an IRS agent – a highly unnatural act.” Asked why the press and public had not paid more attention to this, he responded that the case was so complex and difficult that it would make “Enron seem like kindergarten accounting.”

In his book, Bob Woodward pointed out that the President challenged the Director of Central Intelligence saying that the WMD argument was a weak case. George Tenet’s answer that the case was a “slam dunk” brought this comment: we should not trust “short Greeks using basketball metaphors”

Kay closed with two additional points, both personally important to him.

Wars aren’t won by intelligence but by blood and treasure of young men and women. What intelligence can do is help to prevent wars. Improved intelligence is, therefore, vital.

The phrase “war on poverty, drugs, or terror is a bad metaphor. It leads to misdiagnosis of the problem and the attempt to solve problems by application of force when other solutions are needed.

April 23, 2004

(I'm now writing an opinion column for the "Charlottesville Observer". Here is the next entry.)

Journalists are using the phrase “culture wars” as an all-purpose descriptor for the bitter controversies inflaming local and national media. Talk show hosts quickly make use of incidents such as Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl or Bush’s latest press conference as ammunition for their side of the “war”. Bill O’Reilly includes it as a topic on his television show. Al Franken, and others, have launched Air America, a liberal response to conservative talk radio, as another front in this war.

A look at the origin and history of the phrase will help explain much of the bitterness that characterizes the current Presidential campaign.

In 1990 UVA Professor James Davison Hunter published an article, soon to be part of his book, Culture Wars: the Struggle to Define America. Evangelical Protestants, traditionalist Catholics and Orthodox Jews seemed to be lining up on one side of the political spectrum against their co-religionists on the other side. Issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and the pledge of allegiance now divide members of the same congregation. Hunter quotes evangelical activist Franky Schaeffer who had called for Christians in different denominations to band together in “an ecumenism of orthodoxy” to counter a liberal ecumenism … bound together by unbelief”.

A recent example of this is shown by the way evangelical Protestants strongly supported Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Gibson, an ultra conservative Catholic is working from an artistic tradition of elaborate icons that had been rejected in earlier generations of evangelical Protestantism. On the other side, Gibson is finding many mainstream Catholics objecting to his film on the basis that it is not true to the gospels. The emphasis on Christ’s suffering, they add, is a relatively new (19th century) development in Christian art.

Hunter traces the source of disagreement to the issue of moral authority. He finds two polarizing impulses: orthodoxy and progressivism. Those on the orthodox side are characterized by a commitment to an external, definable and transcendent authority. Progressives are more likely to recast historic truths in terms of contemporary life.

He was concerned about the increasingly bitter controversy between orthodox and progressives. His fears were soon to be confirmed: In 1992 Pat Buchanan told the Republican National Convention that, on abortion, “The conflicting positions can no more be reconciled that those of John Brown and John Calhoun.”

In his next book, Before the Shooting Starts, Hunter searches for paths for compromise in a democratic society. He cites comparative law Professor Mary Ann Glendon’s conclusion that the problem in America is unique. In Europe, where the voters had direct influence on the outcome, abortion is permitted but restricted in various ways. In the United States, Roe v. Wade restricts the voters to fighting over which candidate will chose the Supreme Court justices who will interpret the constitution and decide the outcome. Reaching compromise through the ballot box is unlikely.

Hunter searching for a solution, recommends the Williamsburg Charter, written as part of the bicentennial of the Constitution. The charter recommends four guidelines for political discourse:
• Those who claim the right to dissent should assume the responsibility for debate
• Those who claim the right to criticize should assume the responsibility to comprehend
• Those who claim the right to influence should accept the responsibility not to inflame
• Those who claim the right to participate should accept the responsibility to persuade
My own reaction to this is that it is like the convention of mice that concluded that the solution to the feline threat is to tie a bell around the cat’s neck. Good solution, but who can do it?

There is not much that we in Charlottesville can do about the fat cats in the national media and political arenas. At the local level we can take a hint from Bob Hodous’ Observer column calling for civility in local political discourse – and in Mitchell Van Yahres’ letter in response. We can at least make it clear that, at the local level, we will insist that politicians and media figures treat one another with respect and search for solutions rather than attempt to defeat one another in an all out war in which no compromise is possible.